Amazon Alexa recommends girl touches electric plug
Amazon's Alexa voice assistant recommended a girl touch a coin onto the exposed prongs of a live electric plug, potentially causing her serious injury or setting off an electric fire. Having been asked by the 10-year old for a physical challenge to do, Alexa recommended that she 'Plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs'. The girl’s mother, Kristin Livdahl, described the incident on Twitter. "We were doing some physical challenges, like laying down and rolling over holding a shoe on your foot, from a [physical education] teacher on YouTube earlier. Bad weather outside. She just wanted another one,” she said. That’s when the Amazon Echo speaker, which runs Alexa, suggested partaking in the challenge that it had “found on the web”. Amazon responded by removing the challenge from Alexa's database. The episode highlighted the limitations of AI-powered assistants in understanding context and distinguishing between safety and danger. System 🤖 Amazon Alexa O perator: Kristin Livdahl Developer: Amazon Country: UK Sector: Consumer goods Purpose: Provide information, services Technology: NLP/text analysis; Natural language understanding (NLU); Speech recognition Issue: Accuracy/reliability; Safety
- Date it happened
- 2021-12-01
- Product, system or model
- Amazon Alexa
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